Cash on Demand (1961)

Director: Quentin Lawrence
Writers: David T. Chantler and Lewis Greifer, based on the teleplay The Gold Inside by Jacques Gillies
Stars: Peter Cushing, André Morell, Richard Vernon and Norman Bird

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Richard Vernon may well be one of the least famous names whose centennials I’m covering this year but his is a familiar face to me from British film and television and I’m very happy I pulled this feature out to celebrate his life and career because it’s a hidden gem that I’ve never seen before.

It’s a Hammer but not a horror, as a strange sort of polite but nonetheless brutal heist film that ends up doing the same job as A Christmas Carol, a surprise I was not prepared for.

It’s a fourth opportunity for the leads, Peter Cushing and André Morell, to work together in film and in a fourth genre but with the power dynamic neatly reversed from The Hound of the Baskervilles two years earlier.

And it’s a remake that was made by many of the same hands. It was originally a teleplay for Theatre 70, a drama series produced by ATV, a year earlier, the episode called The Gold Inside. Morell and Vernon reprise their roles and the director, Quentin Lawrence, does likewise. The Cushing role was played by Richard Warner.

We’re in the small town of Haversham, and in a provincial branch of City & Colonial Bank. Excepting shots of a charity collector outside and the parking spot by the kerb, we remain inside that branch throughout, those precious few locations lending this a stage feel. That’s only aided by it being driven almost entirely by dialogue, a powerful brutality delivered in suggestion rather than actual violence.

Cushing is Harry Fordyce, who manages this branch as a nitpicking despot to his staff, with his assistant Pearson, Vernon’s character, his go to target. He upbraids him for not replacing a pen whose nib may be slightly corroded and threatens him with dismissal after signing one of his cashier’s balances that was subtly wrong (but quickly fixed). He uses loaded terms like embezzlement and falsifying the books, even though Pearson has worked for him reliably for eleven years.

At this point, Vernon plays Pearson with a calmly accepting fury, quietly putting up with everything but burning about it inside. He’s a frequently seen supporting character who’s in and out of Fordyce’s office for any number of reasons but he drives none of the story. Yet he gets one of the most crucial moments in the film, which Vernon handles with aplomb.

First, however, the heist. It’s the day before Christmas Eve and we watch the staff arrive to start their day and Fordyce, the petty tyrant, to straighten everything and find fault with at least something. We therefore know who does what. We also know where everything is, after a highly mobile camera suspensefully showed us the entire place during the opening credits. We’ve cased the joint and we’re ready for the story to happen.

That’s Morell’s cue and he has Pearson take his personal card in to Fordyce to announce him as Col. Gore Hepburn. He’s an important guest who explains privately that he works at the Home and Mercantile Banker’s Insurance, the company that insures this branch. He’s on a mission to look into their security protocols.

Really, of course, he’s there to rob the place of £90,000 and his planning is impeccable. We may be used to teams of crooks breaking into banks, flouting complex tech with innovation and ensuring an action packed getaway but he isn’t interested in any of that. This is good old fashioned social engineering at its finest.

He walks in solo, cleverly defuses Pearson’s impact and then calls Fordyce’s house to show him that he has men there ready to seriously hurt his wife and son if he doesn’t play ball. He then has Pearson explain security measures in play and pressures Fordyce into helping him. I almost wanted him to get away with it just for being so confident about the whole thing.

Morell is fantastic here and, just in case we believe it’s all about the heist, he adds levels to the story through observation. Everything is a careful plan but he makes it all seem natural. He’s here to rob the bank but he asks Pearson to move his car off a twenty minute parking spot because he doesn’t want to break the law. And he gives money to Miss Pringle for their Christmas party but has Fordyce pay him back.

However, Morell is consistent throughout as an unflappable thief. Cushing gets a powerful story arc in which he’s taught lessons and sees his little empire very differently after it’s all said and done. He’s even better than Morell, a masterclass performance built by both.

I don’t want to spoil an impeccably vicious plot twist but there is a crucial moment late in the film between Pearson and Fordyce that could have gone very differently indeed were it not for the trustworthy character of the former. It didn’t have to be there but that it is underlines how good the writing is.

It’s also a powerful moment for Vernon who would have been a hundred years old today. I especially appreciated his role here because it goes against type for him.

He’s probably best known for a set of roles in which he played amiable, stuffy and often inconsequential establishment figures such as lords, politicians and military officers, all of whom tended to be far older than he was, due to his height and premature baldness.

Some performances were in shows that few nowadays have seen, such as the lead in the unusual crime drama The Man in Room 17 in the mid sixties, as a criminologist solving cases on a theoretical level at the Department of Social Research, or as the trusted advisor of the lead in The Duchess of Duke Street a decade later, one bet too many changing his life.

Others were far more noticeable, sharing a scene in a train compartment with the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night; explaining to James Bond how Auric Goldfinger moves his money; and as out of touch aristocracy in The Servant.

This predates all of those, as did Village of the Damned in 1960, but his most recognisable roles came later, most notably as Slartibartfast, the award-winning designer of fjords, on both the radio and TV versions of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and as Sir Humphrey’s old friend Sir Desmond Glazebrook in both Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, ironically ending up as Governor of the Bank of England. He also had a role in Kate Bush’s Experiment IV music video.

His first film role appears to be as far back as 1949’s Stop Press Girl, but his career grew in the fifties and kept him busy until Loch Ness, released a year before his death in 1997.